11.24.2014

Black to Comm

Marc Richter's latest as Black To Comm, which follows on his acclaimed soundtrack, EARTH, extends the musician's tool kit of decayed samples, languorous drones and crumbling juxtapositions. The eponymous album glows like a perpetual motion machine run on sunrise and sunset endlessly looped in time lapse. Its crumbling exterior gives way to sporadic channel surfing between stations that play nothing but a combination of equipment balancing tones, religious chants, documentaries on the life cycles of insects and infomercials on how to buy the aforementioned products. The effect is simultaneously strangely mesmerizing and repulsive. Richter's world seems to seethe with UV light pouring from mechanical channels, its the sounds of sentience in machine actualizing to document the lapse of man into lethargy. There's plenty of menace, a clash of pop sheen and that feeling of meditative constancy that attempts to wick away the panic, but never achieves its purpose. Instead the album leaves the listener feeling a sense of drowning in dread from too many unseen forces. Needless to say... its great.